And third, the entire Treasury Department analysis literally fits on one page. If we exclude the headline, the document isn’t quite 400 words (by comparison, the blog post you’re reading right now is 622 words).

What the Trump administration released this morning isn’t an analysis of tax legislation; it’s a joke. Treasury officials had plenty of time to do a thorough policy review, even massage the numbers in a favorable way, and produce something that wasn’t laughable, and all they ended up producing is a one-page document that further contradicts the Republican line about the GOP tax plan paying for itself.

Remember those trump denials that russia interfered with the election?

Twitter this evening released a new set of statistics related to its investigation on Russia propaganda efforts to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election, including that 677,775 people were exposed to social media posts from more than 50,000 automated accounts with links to the Russian government.

US president nominates Mike Pompeo as top diplomat; Gina Haspel to become CIA's first female chief; Tillerson reportedly found out via twee

The two had disagreed over the Iran nuclear deal. Iran agreed before Trump took office to curb its nuclear program in exchange for the easing of economic sanctions. The president regularly criticizes the agreement as a bad deal and has repeatedly threatened to end it.

Trump spoke Tuesday of his desire to break the deal, but noted that Tillerson “felt a little bit differently, so we were not really thinking the same.”

The move came days after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with Trump. Netanyahu said ending or fixing the Iran deal took up most of their conversation.

Haspel is a career spymaster who once ran an agency prison in Thailand where terror suspects were subjected to a harsh interrogation technique that the president has supported.

She briefly ran a secret CIA prison where accused terrorists Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri were waterboarded in 2002. That’s according to current and former US intelligence officials, who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss the issue.

There is always an official executioner. If you try to take his place, It is like trying to be a master carpenter and cutting wood. If you try to cut wood like a master carpenter, you will only hurt your hand.

True. Obama should have gone after the War Criminals.
He focused, instead on Health Care, and got it passed. That was an historic achievement.
Could he have been better? Yes.

Should he have paid all his attention to the Iraq War Criminals, at a time when it looked like the entire world economy was going to collapse?
Maybe. But, I'll bet no one else could have done a better job.

Senator Chuck Schumer (D, NY) says Tillerson’s firing indicates that the Trump administration is disintegrating. I understand why Senator Schumer sees it that way, expecially following all the other dismissals and resignations.

I see it differently. The firing of Secretary of State Tillerson, the movement of CIA Director Pompeo to Secretary of State, and the promotion of Gina Haspel, who oversaw the secret CIA torture prisons in Thailand (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/02/us/p ... iland.html), indicate that the military/security complex has closed its grip on the Trump regime. There will be no more talk of normalizing relations with Russia.

The combination of the Israel Lobby, the neoconservatives, and the military/security complex have proven to be too powerful for peace to be established between the two nuclear powers. If you look at Trump’s administration, the above three forces are those in charge.

Israel remains determined to use the US military to destabilize Syria and Iran in order to isolate Hezbollah and cut off the milita’s support and supplies. The neoconservatives both support Israel’s interest and their own desire for Washington’s hegemony over the world. The military/security complex intends to hold on to the “Russia threat” as a justification of its budget and power.

The presstitutes are in complete harmony with the scheme. Although Russiagate has been proven to be false charges orchestrated by the DNC, FBI, and CIA, the presstitutes continue to repeat the charges as if evidence exists that proves the charges to be true. The “stolen election” is fiction turned into fact. And now we have a new charge, that Putin ordered a former British spy in England to be eliminated while sitting on a park bench with the use of a highly unlikely form of military poison. The charge is preposterous, but that is not preventing the fiction from becoming fact.

Having served in Washington for a quarter century and having known members of the British government, I do not believe that any of them believe the Russiagate and Skripal poisoning stories. What is happening is that an agenda has taken precedence over truth.

This is an extremely dangerous agenda. Russia’s new weapons easily give Russia military superiority over the US. As China and Iran see the situation similarly to the Russians, the US is greatly out-classed. Yet, Washington and its vassals persist in making violent and false charges and threats against Russia, Iran, and on occasion China. Russia, Iran, and China know that these charges are false. Confronting an endless string of false and hostile charges, they prepare for war.

The world is being driven to war, which would be nuclear, by a tiny minority: Israeli Zionists, neoconservatives, and the US military/security complex. We are witnessing the most reckless and irresponsible behavior in world history. Where are the voices against it?

Paul Craig Roberts (born April 3, 1939) is an American economist, journalist, blogger, and former civil servant. He is best known as a journalist specializing in economic affairs from an anti-establishment, liberal conservative perspective. He was the United States Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy under President Reagan in 1981.

There is always an official executioner. If you try to take his place, It is like trying to be a master carpenter and cutting wood. If you try to cut wood like a master carpenter, you will only hurt your hand.

The US retreating into isolationism - "The rest of the world doesn't matter," maybe?
I'm sure it's not, "If China wants to run the world, we will happily step aside for them," although that's what is happening.

Things are proceeding swimmingly. How is it possible to outline the biggest political corruption scandal in modern U.S. history; which utilized the full weight of the institutions of government and the vast intelligence community; against the predictable tide of a mainstream U.S. media apparatus who will shout ‘conspiracy theory’; while every single entity associated with the collaborative effort will protect the group behind the scandal?

There’s the challenge. How do you introduce the scale and scope of corruption to almost half the country who have relied upon the false narrative delivered by fake news for the past two years?

Answer: You assemble a strategic communications team, timed to activate when a key series of events takes place. Joe diGenova is part of that strategic communications team. The triggering event is the OIG release. The purpose of the team is to help the news consumer digest the corruption elephant one bite at a time.

As each individual indictment is parsed and delivered, there will be tens-of-thousands of pages of evidence, multiple witness statements, and a tsunami of investigative supporting material that needs to be unpacked -per person- and understood against the backdrop of the bigger story.

Metta,
Paul.

"The uprooting of identity is seen by the noble ones as pleasurable; but this contradicts what the whole world sees." (Snp 3.12)

"It is natural that one who knows and sees things as they really are is disenchanted and dispassionate." (AN 10.2)

I don't see how any self respecting Buddhist in their right mind would support Donald Trump!!

18 years ago I made one of the most important decisions of my life and entered a local Cambodian Buddhist Temple as a temple boy and, for only 3 weeks, an actual Therevada Buddhist monk. I am not a scholar, great meditator, or authority on Buddhism, but Buddhism is something I love from the Bottom of my heart. It has taught me sobriety, morality, peace, and very importantly that my suffering is optional, and doesn't have to run my life. I hope to give back what little I can to the Buddhist community, sincerely former monk John

Things are proceeding swimmingly. How is it possible to outline the biggest political corruption scandal in modern U.S. history; which utilized the full weight of the institutions of government and the vast intelligence community; against the predictable tide of a mainstream U.S. media apparatus who will shout ‘conspiracy theory’; while every single entity associated with the collaborative effort will protect the group behind the scandal?

There’s the challenge. How do you introduce the scale and scope of corruption to almost half the country who have relied upon the false narrative delivered by fake news for the past two years?

Answer: You assemble a strategic communications team, timed to activate when a key series of events takes place. Joe diGenova is part of that strategic communications team. The triggering event is the OIG release. The purpose of the team is to help the news consumer digest the corruption elephant one bite at a time.

As each individual indictment is parsed and delivered, there will be tens-of-thousands of pages of evidence, multiple witness statements, and a tsunami of investigative supporting material that needs to be unpacked -per person- and understood against the backdrop of the bigger story.

Metta,
Paul.

Retrofuturist presents more imaginative rambling from the conservativetreehouse web page gang. These guys have got great imaginations! Their very impressive inflated idea about what digenova's entry to the trump legal team means is just what conspiracy theorists are looking for......and it looks like retrofuturist has found it!

A simpler, down to earth, and more immediate explanation of trump adding more lawyers to his team (how many now?) is that trump is building a legal moat around himself to protect him from....from....from himself! Trump knows that he has a hard time telling the truth so he has a legal team to parse his every word and then present only the untruths which can not be used against him. Trump knows that sometimes he does tell the truth thinking that it is harmless when in fact it is not harmless and so he has a legal team to parse his every word to suppress the truths that trump tells which are self incriminatory. Trump knows that any communications he has with lawyers can not be subpoened and if it is leaked it can not be used in any legal proceedings (attorney/client privelage) so he has surrounded himself with an entire community of lawyers so that he can have someone to talk to (alot of people around him would rather not talk to him anyway while his lawyers are glad to be employed to do this) and he can speak his mind without his lies and damaging truths having much impact. Some people feel sorry for him for having to live this way in the whitehouse but then they remember that this kind of thing seems to be pretty typical of his entire life which seems to have been full of lawyers....in fact it seems that he very well may have had better and longer lasting relationships with lawyers than he has had with wives.

The conservativetreehouse gang is just making a big deal out of trump's new hired confidant to distract you from the real reasons.
chownah